Emancipation Day. Natasha L. Henry
Society led by William Jones.
Anti-slavery initiatives flourished in Windsor with its high concentration of fugitive supporters. Henry Bibb was appointed as the local vice-president of the Windsor branch for the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. Bibb’s newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive, which began in Sandwich in 1851 and moved operations to Windsor shortly after, played an integral role in the Black community by providing information to local Blacks and attacking the enslavement of Africans in the southern United States. Bibb himself was a fugitive slave from Kentucky and was very active in the abolition movement through his paper and assistance in the settlement of recent escapees. He also managed the Refugee Home Society in Sandwich. White sympathizers active in the movement included John Hurst, who worked with fugitives in Amherstburg before being assigned to Windsor in 1863. As minister of the All Saints Anglican Church, he attempted to integrate his congregation.
Blacks in Windsor also organized themselves to protest and challenge the many forms of racism they faced on a daily basis. In 1855 they were denied the right to purchase town land lots. Blacks like Clayborn Harris and a Mr. Dunn launched legal challenges against the school board in 1859 and 1884 respectively. Mr. Harris complained that the property rented for the Black school was inadequate, but he lost his case. Mr. Dunn took the school board to court for denying admissions to his child. The superintendents’ defence was that it was unsanitary to admit Black children and the courts ruled in favour of the school board. People of African heritage who visited Windsor were refused hotel accommodations. They were not allowed to join Boy Scout troops or the local YMCA. On occasion there were incidents of physical attacks by Whites.
Blacks in Windsor also sought to secure their rights and freedoms through military service. About two hundred Black men defended the Detroit frontier against attacks from Americans during the Rebellion of 1837–38. Josiah Henson, one of the founders of the Dawn Settlement, commanded Black volunteer companies, part of the Essex Militia that commandeered a rebel ship attacking Sandwich. During the First World War, dozens of Windsor’s Black men enlisted in the all-Black No. 2 Construction Battalion in 1916, whose duties included logging, milling, and shipping.
Emancipation Day festivities, which have been held in Windsor since the 1830s, were a culmination of these social dynamics. Because the villages of Windsor and Sandwich were only three kilometres apart (Sandwich amalgamated with the City of Windsor in 1935) and Amherstburg about thirty kilometres away, at times the locale for these commemorations alternated among the three locations. These Ontario towns always received support from the African Americans living in nearby American states, which meant many additional participants. In 1852, large numbers of celebrants from Detroit (their city’s Emancipation Day event had been cancelled), attended the festivities in Windsor.
Because of proximity, Canada shared a close relationship to Detroit and in fact that city was a part of Upper Canada until 1796 when the British surrendered, transferring British administration to the Canadian side thirteen years after the end of the American Revolutionary War. For some time African Canadians had fostered strong social and economic ties to African Americans in Michigan cities like Detroit and Ypsilanti. People from both sides would attend each other’s social events and African Canadians often found employment across the border.
On this day in 1852, as every year, American residents took the ferry across the Detroit River. The street parade began at the military barracks, the present-day site of City Hall Square and Caesar’s Windsor. At the time, the barracks also served as temporary shelter for incoming fugitive slaves. Marchers went to meet the Detroit visitors including the Sons of Union, a Black lodge who arrived by ferry and joined the procession. The grand marshal and assistant marshal escorted them on horseback, and participants carried banners with the phrases, “God, Humanity, the Queen, and a Free Country” and “Am I not a man and a brother?” A Black militia from Amherstburg arrived and were “given the right of the line of march.”46 Another group participating in the parade was the Canadian Friends of the North American League who were identified by the badges they wore.47 The procession continued on to the Pear Tree Grove for a Thanksgiving church service where an anti-slavery song was sung, and Reverend W. Munroe from Detroit delivered an the sermon.
Participants then adjourned to the bank of Detroit River to hear the speeches of the day. Henry Bibb, as Emancipation Day president, extended a warm welcome to all visitors from near and far. Addresses given were directed to the hundreds of African-American freedom seekers in the audience and offered valuable advice on how to benefit from their new, free life. Reverend Munroe recommended that “colored people must work out their own elevation, not trusting the imaginary philanthropy of political rulers.”48 Reverend Samuel May from Syracuse, New York also presented “some noble suggestions to the colored refugee in Canada in relation to how they should get to elevate themselves in the scale of being.”49 The third speaker was Reverend Mr. Culver from Boston, Massachusetts (a White minister), who “urged upon them the necessity of becoming tillers of the soul.”50 Esquire Woodbridge from Sandwich “urged them to go on in well doing, and they would be respected.”51 This comment referred to the way in which the newcomers were understanding and following the laws of the land more, for which they should be commended. He encouraged the crowd to continue to be law-abiding citizens and not to expect special treatment, but equal treatment in all areas including in the enforcement of laws.
After a savoury lunch the assembly resumed and a young girl read a composition she had written and dedicated to Queen Victoria in honour of the occasion. The report in the Voice of the Fugitive makes special mention of the speech by the seven-year old that made the audience proud. The inclusion of this story in the newspaper highlights the involvement of children in early Emancipation Day programs and demonstrates the importance of African-Canadian children receiving an education, a recurring theme at these festivals of freedom.
At the end of the program, Reverend John Lyle from Sandwich closed with the pronouncement of ten toasts to parties in Essex County, the United States, and Britain who were involved in some form in the fight against slavery.52 Indeed, within a short period of time Blacks in Windsor, like their counterparts in other Canadian centres, proved themselves to be industrious and progressive. They succeeded in acquiring ownership of land, exercising voting rights, obtaining an education, and being elected to public office.53
Observances in recognition of the sixty-first anniversary of Emancipation Day were held simultaneously in both Windsor and Sandwich, the result of a growing divergence among attendees over the meaning of this special occasion. Events in Windsor continued to focus more on intellectual stimulation and community development while festivities in Sandwich centred more on partying and having a good time. When out-of-town celebrants arrived on August 1, 1895, in Windsor, they divided into two separate groups with one set going to Walker’s Grove in Windsor to listen to stimulating speeches by Mayor Clarence Mason and Black alderman Robert Dunn. The other group went to Mineral Springs (later Lagoon Park) in Sandwich.54
The ushering in of a new century also symbolized a change in the significance of Emancipation Day and the way in which this notable day was observed not only in Essex County, but in North America as well. Despite the changes, the new kind of celebration seemed to have appealed to many segments of the Black community and Whites, too, as it continued to draw large crowds. Huge celebrations in the first part of the 1900s were hosted at Lagoon Park in the Township of Sandwich, and were attended consistently by several thousand people from Windsor, all points in Ontario, and American states including New York, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. In 1905, five thousand of the attendees were from the United States and in 1909 an estimated ten thousand people converged onto Lagoon Park, including legendary boxer Jack Johnson. 55 It seems to have become a regular practice that there would be two separate celebrations in Essex County, the one at Lagoon Park becoming the most popular: “Lagoon Park drew the larger crowd of the rival celebrations.”56 Many gatherers enjoyed the afternoon activities in Sandwich that consisted of speeches, sports, games, midway rides, and sideshows, then partied in Windsor in the evening. The annual balls included a cakewalk and displays of the latest dance moves including the grizzly bear, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, tangos, two steps, and waltzes.57
The Depression era and the war years experienced another marked